The Farm to Fork Strategy in Poland and Europe

Executive summary

The Farm to Fork Strategy is not a single act or regulation, but a broad EU strategy for transforming the food system. It is embedded in the European Green Deal and implemented through a package of sector-specific rules, the Common Agricultural Policy, food safety standards, labelling rules, measures to reduce food waste and instruments designed to strengthen farmers’ position in the supply chain. By May 2026, implementation is real, but uneven: some tools are already in operation, some have stalled politically, and others have shifted from large framework projects towards more sector-specific and implementation-focused solutions.

For Poland, this means above all that Farm to Fork should not be understood through the lens of a single national act, but as a set of interventions: the CAP Strategic Plan 2023–2027, food safety law, commercial quality control, agricultural retail trade rules, protection of producers against unfair practices and the possibility of applying environmental and quality criteria in public procurement. The Polish system is functional, but institutionally fragmented, particularly where the responsibilities of sanitary, veterinary and commercial quality inspections overlap.

The strongest evidence for the strategy’s effectiveness appears where three levers are combined at once: changes in production practices, reductions in food loss and waste, and a shift in demand towards healthier and more plant-based diets. EU modelling suggests that such a combination could reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to food consumption by around 20% and cut biodiversity damage by 40–50%. The economic effects, however, are uneven: consumers may benefit from lower food spending, while some livestock producers may lose out through lower volumes and prices. At the same time, agriculture in the EU remains the main source of ammonia emissions, and the implementation of the CAP is “greener” than before, but still falls short of the full ambition of the Green Deal.

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Definition, objectives and state of implementation

The Farm to Fork Strategy is the EU’s plan to transform the food system “from primary production to consumption”, based on the One Health approach, which links the health of people, animals, plants and the environment. In Commission documents, it is described as a blueprint for sustainable food systems and includes 27 legislative and non-legislative actions across the value chain.

Its main objectives for 2030 include reducing the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50%, reducing the use of more hazardous pesticides by 50%, cutting nutrient losses by 50% while reducing fertiliser use by 20%, reducing sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals and aquaculture by 50%, and increasing the share of organic farming to 25% of EU agricultural land. These objectives were politically significant because, for the first time, they brought production, consumption and health objectives together in a single package of ambition.

The state of implementation by 2026 is hybrid. On the one hand, the new CAP Strategic Plans are already in place, updated rules for organic production apply, binding food waste reduction targets have entered into force, and data on the sales and use of veterinary antibiotics are covered by a new monitoring system. On the other hand, the proposed regulation on the sustainable use of pesticides has not been adopted, and a harmonised mandatory front-of-pack nutrition label remains an unfulfilled promise of the strategy. In practice, this means that the weight of implementation has shifted from “one major reform” to a mosaic of sectoral measures, national plans and implementation instruments.

Since 2025, the Commission has complemented the Farm to Fork logic with the Vision for Agriculture and Food, and in late 2025 it also launched simplification packages for food and plant health law. This is an important political signal: the transformation objective has not disappeared, but institutional rhetoric now places greater emphasis on resilience, competitiveness and reducing administrative burdens, while maintaining high standards for health and the environment.

The diagram below shows how the strategy works in practice: through a set of regulatory and market levers that influence production methods, food safety, consumer choices and the farmer’s position in the chain. This mechanism follows from the design of the CAP, EU food law and instruments implemented or developed after 2020.

Legal framework in the EU and Poland

The legal basis of the strategy is not a single “Farm to Fork code”, but a network of legal acts. At EU level, the key instruments are: general food law, the regulation on food information to consumers, the regulation on organic production, the directive on unfair trading practices and the regulation on CAP Strategic Plans. In Poland, these regulations are completed by the CAP Strategic Plan 2023–2027, the Act on Food Safety and Nutrition, the Act on the Commercial Quality of Agricultural and Food Products, the Act on Products of Animal Origin and the Act on Counteracting the Unfair Use of Contractual Advantage.

In legal practice in the EU and Poland, one further point matters: some of the original Farm to Fork ambitions now take the form of binding standards, while others remain only policy objectives. The first group includes, among other things, the CAP 2023–2027, the current organic rules, food law and food waste reduction targets following the 2025 amendment to the waste framework. The second includes elements that have not been fully harmonised or have been withdrawn, such as mandatory EU-wide front-of-pack labelling and the SUR regulation on pesticides.

Policy and market instruments

The most important financial instrument remains the Common Agricultural Policy. Since 2023, Member States have had to provide for eco-schemes, and 25% of the direct payments budget is reserved for them. At EU level, CAP Strategic Plans allocate 32% of the total CAP budget to voluntary measures supporting environmental, climate and animal welfare objectives. In Poland, the CAP Strategic Plan 2023–2027 is intended to support not only income and competitiveness, but also the protection of water, soil, air and biodiversity, as well as improving farmers’ position in the value chain. Interest in Polish eco-schemes has grown: in the 2024 application campaign, applications covered an area 2.3 million ha larger than in the previous year.

The second axis is labelling and consumer information. The mandatory core is provided by Regulation 1169/2011, and for organic food by Regulation 2018/848. The problem remains the layer of voluntary labels: the European Court of Auditors found that food labels “can help”, but that the system has significant gaps and controls on voluntary information are limited. This is precisely where one of the strategy’s most visible unfulfilled promises lies: the Commission announced a mandatory, harmonised front-of-pack label, but, according to the ECA, the proposal was not presented within the planned timeframe, and many national schemes still coexist at EU level.

The third block is sanitary standards and flexibility for small producers. Poland implements RHD as a simplified form of activity within food law; the Chief Veterinary Inspectorate explicitly describes RHD as activity carried out “on a small scale” and intended for short distribution chains, with simplified supervision rules and tax preferences. At the same time, the Polish Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development stresses that even in the simplified model, requirements concerning safety, labelling and appropriately prepared facilities remain in place. In practice, flexibility exists, but the costs of sanitary and process-related compliance still often constitute one of the main entry barriers for small processors.

The fourth axis is the supply chain, public procurement and short food supply chains. In the new EU vocabulary, a short chain means a limited number of operators and a real possibility of a direct relationship between farmer and consumer; the CAP Network emphasises that this model can strengthen transparency, traceability, quality and food safety. In Poland, contracting authorities may use environmental criteria and refer to organic production methods in tenders for food supply and catering services, but the national system is based more on the possibility of doing so than on a widespread, central purchasing obligation comparable with French solutions. This is not a legal flaw in itself, but it does mean weaker demand-side leverage.

Since 2025, binding food waste reduction targets have also become an important instrument: 10% in processing and production, and 30% per capita in retail, hospitality, food services and households by 2030. This is an important addition to the strategy because it shifts responsibility beyond the farm itself and replaces a previously soft incentive with a harder systemic requirement.

The diagram below shows the difference between a long and a short food supply chain. In the Farm to Fork logic, a shorter chain is not an end in itself, but a way to shift a larger share of added value to the producer, simplify traceability and build local food resilience.

Impact on the environment, health and the economy

Environmental impact is the strategy’s fundamental justification. The European Environment Agency stresses that the food system is one of the main sources of environmental pressure, and that agriculture alone accounts for 94.4% of ammonia emissions in the EU. In addition, agriculture remains a sector in which non-CO₂ emissions are falling more slowly than in many other parts of the economy, while intensifying droughts and extreme weather events increase production and price risks. From an F2F perspective, this means that food policy can no longer be separated from climate and adaptation policy.

Modelling studies show, however, that restrictions at farm level alone are not enough. The strongest effects come from combining changes in production, reductions in post-harvest losses and dietary change. In this scenario, greenhouse gas emissions linked to food consumption could fall by around 20%, and biodiversity damage by 40–50%. At the same time, in that model, reducing demand for animal products is what most strongly improves nutritional indicators; the other two levers, without a shift in consumption, are not enough to meaningfully change the health profile of diets.

Two strands are particularly important for public health. The first is dietary change: WHO/Europe consistently links food policy with the fight against obesity and non-communicable diseases, and since 2020 the Commission has treated consumer information and the food environment as elements of F2F. The second is antimicrobial resistance: the EMA reported that sales of veterinary antibiotics in Europe fell by 53% between 2011 and 2022, but newer data for 2024 suggest that the downward trend may be flattening or temporarily reversing, as sales for food-producing animals rose by 5% compared with 2023. For policy, this means that the “easy” reductions have already been partly achieved and that more precise sector-specific instruments are needed.

Economically, the strategy creates both new opportunities and redistributive risks. On the opportunity side are payments for climate and environmental practices, more value retained on farms through short chains, the development of local processing, the quality and reputational advantage of the organic sector, and greater resilience to logistical shocks. On the risk side are adjustment costs, investment in sanitary facilities, the need for logistical and digital cooperation and, in some sectors, especially livestock, the possibility of revenue pressure as consumption patterns change. The Commission and the ECA also indicate that the current CAP is greener than its predecessor, but still does not provide certainty that all Green Deal objectives will be delivered in a measurable way.

For small producers, the key distinction is between formal access and effective access. The law may permit RHD, direct sales or entry into public procurement, but real benefits appear only when there is shared logistics, local packing and preparation centres, HACCP training and advisory support. Effective implementation therefore does not result from law alone, but from linking the law with the organisation of purchasing, deliveries, education and advice.

Barriers, risks, scenarios and recommendations

The main barriers to implementation today are political, organisational and measurement-related. Politically, this can be seen in the withdrawal of the EU SUR proposal. Organisationally, it is visible in the fact that small farms often lack shared logistics, cold storage, simple processing capacity and the resources to deal with sanitary rules and public procurement. In measurement terms, the CAP is greener, but the ECA stresses the lack of sufficiently measurable contributions from national plans to Green Deal objectives; similar gaps concern voluntary labels and some data on short chains. Climate is an additional risk: in the EU, drought now accounts for most agricultural losses linked to weather events.

There is also the risk of an uneven distribution of transformation costs. Modelling shows that consumers may benefit, but some livestock producers may lose out temporarily. The French organic market shows that even strong institutional frameworks do not automatically guarantee lasting growth in organic area if retail demand or the economic environment weakens. Effective Farm to Fork policy therefore cannot be only a policy of restrictions; it must also build demand, contracts, training and transition infrastructure.

The scenarios below are the author’s analytical synthesis based on the sources and national examples discussed above. They are not a forecast by the Commission or the Polish Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, but an attempt to organise the most likely directions of implementation in Poland by the end of the current decade.

The most rational set of recommendations for Poland and public institutions is now as follows. First, it is worth introducing graduated national or sectoral purchasing targets for schools, hospitals and public bodies, rather than limiting policy to merely allowing quality criteria. Second, local logistics and processing hubs should be built for small producers, because they form the real bridge between RHD and larger volumes. Third, more consistent monitoring of short chains, food waste and health effects is needed. Fourth, the operational entry of small farms into public supply chains should be simplified through specification templates, framework contracts, HACCP training and joint offers from producer groups. Fifth, the EU should complete what remains unfinished in F2F: a coherent labelling architecture and a stronger, measurable link between the CAP and environmental objectives.

For market practitioners, the conclusion is simpler: the greatest advantage is gained not by individual producers, but by producers who cooperate. In Farm to Fork, the winning models combine quality, recognisable origin, shared logistics, simplified processing and stable institutional customers. This is confirmed by European implementation experience.

Priority sources and limitations

The following groups of sources should be treated as the highest priority. They should form the basic monitoring set for administrations, local authorities, producers and analysts working on Farm to Fork.

There are three main limitations to this report. First, there is no single public and continuously updated indicator for all Polish RHD, because some data are dispersed across different inspection bodies; for this reason, the analysis used the particularly well-documented segment of food of plant origin and data on the organic sector. Second, the EU does not yet have a fully harmonised set of indicators for short food supply chains, and operational definitions in documents have changed between programming periods. Third, some of the latest effects, especially on health and income, will only be possible to assess more reliably after the current CAP period is more fully closed and after further years of ESUAvet and food waste reporting. Where data remain incomplete, this has been clearly indicated in the report.

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